Well, not quite: I had to sheepishly straighten up afterwards, there was no chance of opening the boot and it was only my partner who expressed admiration – and only after I asked.
But the fact remains that I simply couldn’t have parked in anything bigger. While today’s Cooper is, of course, gigantic in comparison to the classic Mini, its dimensions have barely increased over the previous generation and it’s only very slightly bigger than the original BMW Mini of 2000. It remains a resolutely tiny car in the modern context.
Yet it just doesn’t feel especially tiny. The front seats are anything but cramped, the rears can take an average-sized adult or two for short hops and I’ve even yet to find the 210-litre boot wanting for capacity.
I went to the dump last week with all my garden waste, a couple of lengthy old shelves, a coffee machine and a small cupboard – standard fare for the casual tip tripper – and once I’d folded the rear seat flat, I might as well have had a little van at my disposal (725 litres).
Of course, about 12 minutes after I’d written the first draft of this report – which concluded with the line “I can’t honestly see why you’d need anything bigger for one-, two- or even three-up motoring” – my partner sent me a celebratory text to let me know she’d bought a cabinet on Facebook marketplace. “Don’t worry, it splits into two pieces!” she reassured me.
I didn’t even need to get the tape measure out to know I had no hope of getting either of those two pieces in the Mini, and so it was with a grim sense of defeat that I reluctantly opened the Zipcar app and paid £50 for three hours in a stinking, battered Volkswagen Transporter van.
Verdict
Heartbreak and elation in equal measure this week as my jolly Sunnyside Yellow Mini Cooper 3dr is snatched away and a rather more sinister Cooper S 5dr in Legend Grey is shuffled in to fill its space — and a little more besides.
The pang of sadness as YB24 HYJ departs is short-lived, because I’m technically moving up in the world: after a few months in the purest of modern Minis, the entry Cooper C, I’m swapping into the roomier and racier range-topper, all 201bhp, five doors and £34,500 of it. Punchy.